Maybe, let’s say, your usual routine is lettuce with tomatoes and cucumbers. Maybe you’re comfortable with that routine. Maybe that routine happens every week. If you step out beyond this good history to put, all of a sudden, something like granola on top of your greens, you’re breaking tradition. Breaking tradition is scary. Breaking tradition involves risk. Changing things up invites both possibility and disappointment. You’re effectively saying, in spite of all the comfort and security of what was, you’re willing to welcome what could be.

That’s one reason to try making a salad with granola. Because it forces you to look at a new idea and give it a chance. It forces you to move forward, to take a step. This food concept, like so many food concepts before it, holds that same undeniable power that usually accompanies the decision to add one new thing to one ordinary thing and, in the process, fashion something altogether new. It’s the same power that guides and even defines creative life, says Dorothy Sayers, who emphasizes the creation aspect of artistic work.

She writes, “If the common man asks the artist for help in producing moral judgements or practical solutions, the only answer he can get is something like this: you must learn to handle practical situations as I handle the material of my book. You must take them and use them to make a new thing.” Not a normal thing. Not the thing you’ve always done. A new thing. Use them to create something that previously didn’t exist. Move past what’s behind. Step forward.

Last week, like probably every other person in my demographic, I saw the trailer for the new Gilmore Girls revival. It came up in my newsfeeds dozens of times the day it released. One friend said she was crying; another said she couldn’t wait. As someone who came of age in the 2000s, who’s seen all the episodes, I could relate. Lorelai and Rory were the characters who accompanied me on quiet nights after working at the insurance office in Lisle, Illinois where I was employed for $10 per hour straight out of college. They were in my laptop’s DVD player on nights in my twenties when I couldn’t sleep. When I went to New England for the first time, it didn’t feel like a history book; it felt like Stars Hollow. When a friend of mine was stuck on a layover for hours, she didn’t panic; she watched episode after episode alone in a terminal. Still today, every autumn, when I sip a chai and look at the leaves, I wish I had my own local Luke’s.

This happy little show with its happy little dialogues has been a constant throughout my adult life. But when I watched the trailer for the revival, what shocked me most was not that the familiar characters were, now, undeniably almost ten years older, it was how it meant that, if they were, so was I. I had the same reaction watching the sequel to My Big Fat Greek Wedding. There’s the part of the world where I grew up: Chicago. There’s the family she had when she was single, but now she’s a married mom. Everyone’s 14 years older! Life doesn’t stay exactly the same!

Sometimes, I’ll admit it, I want to go back. I’m not interested in reliving high school, no thanks, but there were some parts of college, some parts of my early adulthood, those early days when I’d just met Tim, that were pretty uniquely free and fun. When I’m confronted with how a chunk of those days disappeared before me, with how I can’t watch an old show like the old me, I’m surprised how short the seasons flew. Nostalgia makes me wistful and sometimes sad. But then I read Ecclesiastes.

“Say not ‘Why were the former days better than these?'” it says in chapter 7. “For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.” When I want things to always stay the same, to never change, to keep me young and less responsible and less aware of hard realities in life, it’s not from wisdom. When I want to stay in my ruts and traditions and never question routine, it’s a surefire recipe for disappointment, as this world changes whether I like it or not. Say not the former days were better than these, Solomon says. Treasure them, remember them, but be here, today. Keep moving forward into what will be.

The folks at Purely Elizabeth invited us into new possibility when they approached us recently about sending over some products to try. Our response was an easy yes because, truth is, we love their granola. I’ve actually mentioned it here before, in a Christmas gift ideas roundup back in 2014. Back then, we’d been finding it at Home Goods, where it drew us in with the clean ingredients and won us over with its addictive blueberry hemp flavor. Now, it’s available in many more locations in Nashville, in many more flavors.

The samples we got last month expanded our Purely Elizabeth interests past the granola and into ancient grains instant oatmeal, an easy, nutrient-rich breakfast option we can whip up in minutes for Rocco and for us. More than that, though, it let us top everything from parfait bowls to panna cotta with probiotic granola, a cool option Purely Elizabeth now makes in both chocolate sea salt and maple walnut flavors. The maple walnut, both sweet and savory, just begs to accent a salad bowl. That’s how this recipe for salad with granola was born.

When you’re comfortable in a certain place in life, branching out into a new thing can be daunting, even if it’s just a new food thing. Change invites the unknown.

So here is what I did. I started with an idea: salad with granola. I had this vague memory of a salad with granola I ate somewhere at a restaurant once. I don’t know where or when. I do remember I loved it. Also, I read something in Bon Appetit about how granola in salad is a new restaurant trend. Or, at least, it was a new restaurant trend, two years ago, when that article was first released. (I’ve never been a trendsetter.) Tim and I talked about ideas. I browsed lettuces at the store. I picked up some things that looked good. We talked about ideas some more.

What evolved, farther and farther removed from our usual salad routine, was a combination of organic lettuces, goat cheese, pomegranate seeds, mandarin oranges and Purely Elizabeth maple walnut granola clusters. It’s a salad we’ve now had three times in the last week. It’s a salad that looks nothing like our usual salads. It’s a salad that, launched with one small change of putting granola inside, changed and changed and changed again until it became something completely its own, virtually unrecognizable, a “new thing.”

I remember a post I wrote here in 2009 about change. Or, really, it was about the lack of change I was then experiencing in my life. From that season of stability, I found it was newness I longed for instead of old times. “Everywhere around me, people are rushing for things—new places and careers, new relationships, new life, even—and I am watching them,” I wrote. I didn’t know then that the very act of writing those words was a step that would usher in change after change in the years to come. Nor did I know six months later, Tim would email me, or that, two years later, I’d be living in another state. But that’s the way change comes, isn’t it? One small thing and one small thing and, woah, how did I get to this new place?

I was telling someone Sunday about how I’ve lived in Nashville more than five years. Five years! It still surprises me that what started with a simple email exchange and months of phone calls led to becoming a freelancer and moving to Music City and making this place my new life. But the reality is we’re, all of us, always changing. None of us is fully static. Even when we feel like we’re stuck, our days are going by.

Adding granola to a salad may not be as pivotal as noticing someone new or as inspiring as starting a creative project. Mixing up a salad routine may not be as transformative as a geographic relocation or a job change. But, because pushing away from the expected moves towards possibility, into newness, into what could be, it’s always, undeniably, a step.

That’s why, making salad with granola may not change your life, but, then again, it may. Trying something new in the kitchen may be another detail of your day, or it may be the first link in a long chain of change. Who can resist it when you think of it this way? Who, alive to possibility, wouldn’t want to push the door ahead of you open just a little wider, just a little braver, if only to see what it brings?

Special thanks to Purely Elizabeth for sending us over some products to try. As always, all opinions expressed in this post are our own.

Think of granola in a salad as crunchy, nutty croutons, an easy, foolproof way to add nuts and grains. In this salad, they add texture and maple flavor, a welcome complement to the dressed greens and creamy goat cheese.

Since I’m not a person who usually measures salad dressing ingredients, all I can tell you here is to drizzle a little olive oil and balsamic, toss, taste and adjust. In my personal experience, less is more, so take your time getting it to the level you like. Also, it’s probably obvious, but the beauty of salads like this is you can raise or lower any ingredient’s proportion to fit what you like. Enjoy! If you make it, we’d love to hear what you think.

Some Notes

ALTERNATIVES: Any light greens would work here (think yes microgreens, no Romaine). You could use dried cranberries or raisins instead of pomegranate seeds. You could go with feta instead of goat cheese. Instead of mandarin oranges, you could used sliced or segmented regular oranges. Or to avoid citrus altogether, why not strawberries or peaches?

It’s Friday afternoon. I’m sitting at my work desk, one half of a full-wall desk Tim built for me a few months after Rocco was born. My chair is next to a window to the backyard, a lush monochrome of greens, and from it, as I finish my plate of chicken fajitas, I hear the quiet hum of a plane whooshing by overhead. The baby is asleep. The house is still. I have work projects awaiting me, and, right now, while I have the space, I should get to them, but first I want to mark this moment, this stillness. In the first days with a newborn, you think you’ll never have chunks of stillness again, but here it is, peaceful and ordinary and real.

I’m in the midst of a new book, God in the Dark, a journal of thoughts written by poet Luci Shaw. I grabbed it Wednesday night at the library, on a whim, and I’m already so far through, I’ll finish it Saturday, cozy on the sofa with Tim as sunlight streams through house. This collection of short thoughts, thoughts Luci kept in the 1980s while her husband got sick, went through chemo, died and then left her a widow, are easy to read, almost like modern-day blog posts. She deals with all the important topics you’d expect in a book like this: suffering, relationships, faith, grief. But, also, notably, unforgettably, she deals with beauty. Even amidst a hard, painful, tragic set of events, Luci is regularly, constantly arrested by the beauty around her. She is always remarking on or pulling her car over (mid-appointments, pre-breakfast, on vacations, before bad news, on the way to church, on the way home from brunch) to see something that catches her eye. She stops to notice the light as it hits a golden maple tree or clicks her camera’s shutter just as the sun shines through a certain throat of road.

The night I started reading her book, immediately drawn in to the poetic words, I Googled her and read about her life and saw some of her photos, taken with the eye of attention. There’s something I recognize in myself in the way she draws in close to fern fronds or the delicate petals of a bloom. I also found this interview, posted last year, where, she said this:

“My work, given to me by God, is to pay attention. This is to investigate, think about, pray about, and write about ordinary things to expose their significance. I need to write down what I observe and what I intrinsically know so it doesn’t get lost in the daily-ness of life.”

Even as she’s not writing poetry, she’s doing something poetry’s known for: slowing me down, making me think, shining an awareness of value into what could seem routine. She’s reminding me, in fact, of the ideas from another poet I talked about here recently and about the significance of marking value so it’s not lost. I thought about it yesterday when I was driving east of the city, past airport roads fringed by wildflowers growing out of concrete. I thought about it this Friday morning when I was laughing at Rocco slapping his hands together in the living room, one over the other, again and again. And just now, when I pulled out leftover chicken fajitas to warm up for lunch and reheat, when I handed Tim a plate of them where he’s working on his laptop on the sofa, when I took a plate back to my work desk, to eat, I couldn’t do it without stopping, just for a second, to think about it, notice it, give thanks.

There are lots of stories I could tell you about these fajitas, which we’ve been making for over a year and, for a solid chunk of months, once a week. They first came to us last spring, when my brother made them for us on one of our visits to Chicago; then, in the first few weeks after Rocco’s birth, he made them for us again, here in our home. I remember feeling so ravenously hungry when I ate them last July, constant nursing and napping sessions punctuated by watching TV and taking something else to my mouth. Every meal someone brought us was manna–a provision straight from God to me–and when I ate my warmed white spelt tortilla stuffed with chunks of spicy chicken topped by salsa, lettuce and cheese, I couldn’t believe how good it felt to fill my belly to the brim.

Months later, when friends had babies, these fajitas were what I usually brought. When I wanted a meal I knew we would love, both for the nostalgia of a big heap of chicken (just like my mom always made) and for the belly-filling joy of a hearty plate, it was these fajitas again. For several months of meal planning, we included them every week. Making them again yesterday, all those moments came rushing back to me. This is the power of a beloved recipe.

And what is worth marking now, here in this space, is the ordinary poetry of meals like these, meals made as part of routine, shared with one another, pulled out to warm up on the stove so we can keep working at our respective corners of the house. These meals aren’t always flashy or pinnable, but they’re useful and, more than that, used. They’re the actual meals we’re actually making to keeping getting from day to day. They’re functional and enjoyable and happily passed on, from brother to sister to friend, because everybody wants another good way to put dinner on the table each night.

This is what makes me want to food blog, less of a passion for cooking and more of a passion for enjoying. I’m not a chef and don’t pretend to be; I’m not even an obsessive home cook; I just enjoy food. I enjoy what it connects to and how it fits into the rest of life. I enjoy talking about it to talk about everything else. And like Robert Capon said, “The world may not need another cookbook, but it needs all the food lovers it can get” (paraphrased).

It is my opinion that our everyday moments, alongside chicken fajitas or what-have-you, are remarkably valuable and worth our attention. They are worth pulling the car over, so to speak, worth pulling out the mental shutter, worth pausing often to look at and see. I want this space to be a sort of poet’s look at food, more than a list of recipes, more than pretty photos. I want it to be an online space the celebrates everyday beauty through or alongside something to eat. After all, whether our days be currently filled with grieving and hospital visits or celebrating and exciting trips, they are still, usually, naturally punctuated by invitations to stop, if just for lunch, and not take for granted what is sitting on our plates. What a beautiful way to see the world gratitude gives us! What wisdom in seeing and spreading beauty wherever we go! I am learning from the poets, growing towards them, wondering how I can better celebrate the wild and wondrous world in which we live. If you’re here with me, noticing where you are, I’m glad.

Chicken Fajitas

After making this a couple times, I decided we like our fajitas heavier on the peppers and onions than most people, so the biggest departure from the original recipe here is doubled amounts of vegetables. You can also feel free to adjust to your liking; truthfully, another pepper wouldn’t bother me at all here.

Also note: You can make the chicken marinade a few hours ahead of time or right away when you’re ready to cook; I’ve done either way and either way works.

Directions:
In a large glass bowl, combine all the marinade ingredients, stir everything together with a spoon or your clean hands until the chicken is fully coated. Cover bowl and stick it in the fridge for a few hours, until you’re ready to start dinner, or a few minutes, while you make the pepper-onion mixture.

In your biggest skillet, warm the coconut oil and add all the peppers and onions. Toss the salt over the top. Cook, stirring often, until peppers are soft and just starting to char. Then, scoop them all out to a clean bowl or plate.

In the same skillet, scoop out the chicken pieces from the marinade bowl with tongs and cook for a few minutes on each side, without stirring, until chicken is fully cooked and beautifully golden. Add all the peppers and onions (if your skillet won’t fit everything, you can do this in batches) and lower heat to just barely still on.

Even as Tim and I made these (baked) fried chicken salads last Saturday, it was with an awareness that we are remarkably privileged to be able to go to the store, pick out what we want to bring home and then, together, cook it to have something good to eat. Not everybody knows these luxuries. With that in mind, we’re glad to write this post as ambassadors for Walmart’s current Fight Hunger program, one step towards eradicating the real issues of hunger today, with the help of consumers and six key vendors, working towards an overall goal of providing 75 million meals to Feeding America Food Banks nationwide (and they’re close!). Below, in this sponsored post, we are sharing some information about Walmart’s current program along with a recipe for the killer chicken we made last weekend, set on top of salads that, in honor of the work Walmart is doing now, feature ingredients found at our local retail location.

In our protected pocket of middle-class America, it’s hard to believe that one in six Americans (!) is struggling with hunger. But unfortunately, according to the USDA, that is exactly the case. What’s even harder to believe is that we can do anything to help when we’re just small people with small budgets ourselves. Because of this, most cities have food banks and other charities set up that try to provide meals to people who need them—here in Nashville, we have Second Harvest, for example—but, even still, the needs are big. One way that Walmart is responding is that, now through May 3, it’s giving consumers a way to make a difference every time they shop: every time someone purchases a participating product at one of its stores, the company gives the equivalent of one meal to Feeding America. If you don’t purchase participating products, you can participate in the initiative by giving $1, $2, $5 or other donations at the register when you check out. And if you’re on social media, tag a photo with #WeSparkChange and Walmart will donate a meal each time, up to $1,500,000, to Feeding America.

Sometimes when we’re at our local Walmart picking up distilled water or paper products, we might grab some of the cheap and ripe avocados as we go. Recently, we decided to see what else we might find and walked away with organic spring mix and mangos alongside our $0.98 avocado finds. At home, we chopped the ripe mangos and avocados, tossed them with finely chopped spring mix and a dressing of olive oil, balsamic and lemon juice, salting everything to taste. It was the perfect sweet and creamy mixture to have our breaded chicken pieces on—the same breaded chicken pieces Tim made me a few weeks ago when I was craving fried chicken, ah!, they’re so good!—the night before we celebrated his birthday last week. It’s also a testament to simple pleasures and simple choices that can make a big difference, whether in the simple course of a day or in another person’s life.

One quick note: We almost always end up with extra flour mixture when we bread something like chicken, so if you want to avoid this, you could lower the flour in the proportions below. I’m just leaving it the way we did it though.

Directions:
Preheat oven to 375F degrees and grease a rimmed baking sheet (we added maybe 2 tablespoons coconut oil and stuck the pan in the oven for a few minutes while we assembled stations, to melt oil).

Next, create a chicken assembly station, with four main stations:

1. Chicken: Cut chicken into strips, aiming for similar thickness and size among all of them, and place them on a plate.
2. Eggs: Crack two eggs into a wide bowl, and add ½ teaspoon salt and ¼ teaspoon pepper, whisking together.
3. Flour: Place flour and spices under “flour mixture” on a third plate or wide bowl, stirring together.
4. Breadcrumbs: Place one cup toasted breadcrumbs, 1 tablespoon all-purpose seasoning and 1/2 teaspoon salt on a fourth plate or wide bowl, stirring everything together.

Begin dredging process. Working with one or a few pieces of chicken at a time, coat each one in flour, dip in eggs and dredge in breadcrumbs, making sure each piece is really thoroughly coated in the breadcrumb mixture. Place chicken pieces on prepared oiled baking sheet (remove from oven if you haven’t already).

Once all the chicken is coated and placed on baking sheet, drizzle the top of all the pieces with olive oil.

Place baking sheet in oven and cook for 30 minutes, using kitchen tongs to turn all the chicken about halfway through.

Directions:
Mix all the ingredients in a large bowl, tossing well. Taste and adjust salt as you like. Serve beneath baked fried chicken from above recipe!

disclaimer: As a participant in this campaign with Walmart, I have received compensation for my time and efforts in creating this post. As always, however, all thoughts and opinions are my own. also note that Walmart is not responsible for donating the meals, but rather the supplier partners listed above are responsible for that. As part of this initiative, *the monetary equivalent of meals will be donated. $0.10 is equivalent to one meal secured by Feeding America on behalf of local member food banks. See Walmart.com/FightHunger for details. #wesparkchange #shop2give #ad

If you asked the average Joe today what he thinks about salad, ten to one he says something about “healthy.” I’m a 1980s baby, a Millennial, a product of the decade marked by thick shoulder pads and Jell-O Pudding Pops commercials with smiling Bill Cosby on the screen, and what I remember most about the salads in my childhood is that there weren’t many. My school cafeteria had Pizza Day and Hot Dog Day, and, by the time I was a senior, when I was the one running to Aldi to grab the cheapest versions of buns and chips and candy bars for us to resell, I was never picking up greens or vegetables or even fruit. (Who would buy them, especially when they could get a giant Coke for less?) Besides that, salads were rabbit food—crunchy and raw, the sort of thing you needed to chomp at before you could swallow—and they couldn’t fill you up like the burgers we made on grill day or the bread-heavy pizzas each week, right? You’d eat salad if you were dieting. Or maybe if they went with your aerobics plan because, in the years of Richard Simmons’s dance moves and Suzanne Somers’s thighs, aerobics was a pretty big thing to do.

Of course, the ’80s were 30 years ago, I am still shocked to realize, and high school feels even farther gone than that. While Tim and I were in Chicago recently, we spent a day with my friend Jackie who used to have a locker under mine, sometime in 1997 or ’98, I think, when she was in eighth grade and I was a sophomore at our small private school. She’s getting married in November, to a sweet, soft-spoken guy who rides the Metra and works with numbers each day, and after the four of us toured the historic stone mansion where they’ll be having the wedding in Joliet, we headed to Chipotle for lunch. There, three out of four ate big bowls of greens as our choice, not our punishment, of entrée, salads the sort of thing we actually like to eat.

So sure, salad’s come a long way in my lifetime, especially in my particular lifetime, where the me of 1994 and the me of 2014 have precious little in common by way of typical diet each week. We all know that there are salad restaurants, salad buffets, entire sections of salads on most menus of most restaurants or, at least, at the ones where you sit down to eat. If you go to Google and type “salad,” there are over 21 million results brought up in less than a minute, as in more than 20 times the amount of people living in Nashville in 2012. 81% of Americans eat at least one salad a week, says an infographic made by Mint. Most fast-food restaurants offer salads on their menus, catering at least in theory if not in actuality, to people looking for a healthier way to eat. If there’s one thing people today seem to know about salad, it’s that it’s good for you, the thing you pick when you care about your body and your health and you want something fresh.

Here is my only problem with that: I know what it’s like to do things, like eat salad, because I think that I should, not because there’s anything particularly alluring about the idea to my heart. The former me, the one with big bangs and braces and an affinity for clothes sold at Abercrombie, ate salad when I was forced to, when my mom put it on the table or when my peers were saying salads were a virtuous choice. Some people are good at things like that; I’m not. So when I hear people talk about the health perks of salad, when I talk about the health benefits of salad, I wonder if there’s something of a disservice going on. Leafy greens, like all fresh produce, are more than nutritious. Salad is more than low in calories and high in vitamins and minerals that make your body well. Salad can also be delicious. When you find the right combination of textures and flavors, like a triple berry salad or a leafy sprouts salad with a sweet and spicy homemade vinaigrette, it doesn’t have to be a thing to get through; it can be a thing to savor. Salad can fill you up. And while the former me ate salad when I had to, the present me often debates between salad and something else on a menu because I find so much pleasure in a colorful, tall stack of vegetables on my plate. Case in point: this peach and corn salad. A seasonal celebration of the season that I also don’t have to fake affection for, every day marveling at the fierce sunlight and blistering heat and the way these things make the world around us grow.

Sometimes Tim will thank me for doing something for him: making him green beans or grabbing a glass of water or sitting for a long while to talk, and I’ll want to say, why are you thanking me? I love you! This makes me happy, too! And I think there’s something wonderful about that. Just as it is good to sacrificially love, so too it is good to get to love like this out of joy, out of delight, out of a natural pleasure that comes from seeking another’s good. It’s as true with us and food as it is with us and each other. It’s as true with us and each other as it is with us and God. And just like it is good to want to eat food that nourishes our bodies because it nourishes our bodies, so too it is good (better!) to want to eat it because we also want to eat it, because we like it, because it tastes good, because when we eat it we are delighted and that delight keeps us returning, over and over again, to another salad on our plates. I was past Y2K and halfway through college when I started to see the joy that is available in God, the pure soul-satisfying pleasure He provides and how all the other things—commands, principles, lessons—of the Bible flow out of that. I was out of grad school when I started to see the pure pleasure in the food He’s made. These days, salads are often the very things pointing me to Him, filling my heart with gratitude, for a world I have not made and food I have not grown, piled onto my plate to eat.

“Always you renounce a lesser good for a greater; the opposite is sin. Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy – fully armed too, as it’s a highly dangerous quest.” Flannery O’Connor

In a medium size pot at least the width of your corn cobs, bring enough water to fill the pot to boil. Add corn cobs and cook until kernels are firm yet tender, or to the doneness you like, about 3 to 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, chop lettuce finely and place in a large bowl. Remove corn cobs from pot to a cutting board and slice off the kernels vertically. Add corn to bowl of greens. Add sliced peaches, juice of two limes, olive oil and mint. Toss gently, and season (generously!) with sea salt and extra pepper, to taste.

This year’s CSA started Monday with a first week loaded with lettuce (baskets and baskets of lettuce!)… there was so much lettuce, in fact, that our farmers were giving it away, as much as you could take, whether or not you have the larger, family-sized share (we don’t). It was hard for my frugal heart to take only two heads (even in addition to the kale, pokeweed, catnip, etc.), but it was easier when I unpacked our bags at home and tried to figure out how two of us would eat so many greens before they wilt. It almost goes without saying that we’ve been eating salads ever since. Salads with goat cheese and pesto, salads with a hodge podge of vegetables or fresh strawberries (from our other farmer!) and salads like this triple berry one we had tonight. At its heart, this is a simple combination, but the shallots and walnuts add a more complex, savory note that reminds me of Thanksgiving, and then the whole thing gets kicked up even further with the cayenne-honey oil/vinegar on top.

It’s not hard to like pictures of plates piled high with lettuce and berries, but between you and me it’s that last one that I like best, just above, because it’s got Tim in it, and I’m so thankful for every bit of life I have with him in it, from our late nights in the kitchen with YouTube music videos playing to our early nights at the table with salads we’ve just prepped side by side. He’s not perfect, I’m not perfect, and being married to each other means rubbing up against each other’s imperfections all the time, but, man, the rewards of love outweigh the risks. I was thinking tonight how he is probably the only person I’ve ever known in my entire life who lets me challenge him, and I don’t mean with soft questions, about everything from nutrition to sanctification to how to manage stocks, and he doesn’t run away or go anywhere when I’m pushing something I want to understand; he doesn’t hold it against me or get mad; instead, he keeps talking and stays to work it out. It still surprises me I’m married to him. It surprises me I know him. I can’t think of any explanation for it but the loving hand of Providence giving a good gift.

Triple Berry Salad

Triple Berry Salad with Sauteéd Shallots and Walnuts in a Cayenne-Honey Vinaigrette

By: FoodLovesWriting.com

Serving Size: 2

In this weeknight salad for two, the fresh crunch of leaf lettuce pairs beautifully with sweet berries, a savory blend of sauteéd shallots and walnuts, and the sweet and spicy dressing.

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon coconut oil

2 shallots, peeled and sliced

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

8 cups chopped leaf lettuce

1 cup quartered strawberries

1/2 cup blueberries

1/2 cup raspberries

for the dressing:

3 tablespoons raw apple cider vinegar

4 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons honey

2 to 3 dashes cardamom powder

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

Directions:

In a large skillet, melt coconut oil over medium-low heat. Add sliced shallots and cook about 5 to 10 minutes, until they are just beginning to brown. Add walnuts and continue cooking to toast the nuts, about 5 minutes more. remove from heat.

In a large bowl or split onto two plates, combine lettuce, strawberries, blueberries and raspberries. Meanwhile, while shallots and walnuts cool slightly, make dressing. In a small bowl, whisk together dressing ingredients, taste and adjust seasonings as desired. Drizzle dressing on top of salad (you will likely have some leftover to use for later).

Looking for a winter lettuce salad recipe? Welcome! And if you’re finding this post not in winter, substitute in some summer greens and enjoy. You can find some of our favorite summer recipes here.

Since we’ve last talked over here, as you might expect, Tim and I have been spending all our spare moments in the kitchen. This weekend, we’ve tested 12 recipes in two days. I guess this is another way of saying you’re all invited over for dinner. Hope you don’t mind the complete disaster that is our living room and our dining room and everything else. We did make our bed this morning because we like to look at it, all neat and folded and inviting, to feel like we’re still civilized humans, but of course that only works if our eyes are able to avoid the pile of laundry next to it on the floor.

Friday night there were cookies—four test batches before we hit the win. This afternoon, Tim sliced a loaf of marbled einkorn rye so pretty, it took my breath away. Now, he’s in front of the stove, watching another experiment bake, and I’m giving thanks again that I get to undertake this project with him.

Writing a cookbook is daunting, I don’t know how else to say it. You come up with ideas, you buy ingredients, you test ideas. They don’t work. You test ideas. They do work. You buy more ingredients, you do more tests, you throw your hands up in the air when you think about things like budgets and regular work hours. Mostly, you feel like there’s no way you’ll be able to get it all done.

People ask you about your new project The Cookbook and you hear yourself saying things like you’re a little overwhelmed and you feel like you’re mind’s still at the stove. When you come home later, you realize you forgot to say you’re also glad. Just like when you were planning a wedding or looking for a place to rent or traveling, you know that this stressful task before you is good.

I read a poem a few months ago that stopped me in my tracks when I found it, particularly this line:

“Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second,
Then decide what to do with your time.
-Naomi Shihab Nye (from “The Art of Disappearing”)

I like it because it reminds me that in life we are always busying ourselves with something, be it holiday shopping or extra work hours or writing a cookbook. In the midst of our projects, our work feels all-important, so exhausting, like a task that will never end. We’re tired and we’re focused, and when people ask us about our days, our tasks are what pour out. But we could tumble any second, no matter how fast we’re moving. Every moment is a gift.

This winter lettuce salad, inspired by one we saw (but never tasted!) on a daily menu from Nashville’s Margot, which is one of our favorite restaurants in the city, filled up a few of our moments this month. We ate it with my brother-in-law on a Sunday afternoon at our table, dishes in the sink and lists on the fridge. It features seasonal greens (any winter lettuces would work); slippery, oily roasted red peppers; crumbles of tangy feta; and a rosemary garlic vinaigrette. I want to remember it as a way we lived this month, in and amongst a busy schedule, before Christmas came.

Winter Lettuce Salad with Roasted Peppers and Feta

The only tricky thing about this recipe is roasting the bell pepper ahead of time, but even that's pretty mindless if you simple halve and seed the pepper the day before, oil it and place it on a baking sheet, and then put it in a 375F oven until the skin is black on the outside and the pepper is super soft. Once cooled, the skins will peel right off, leaving pure gold roasted peppers underneath. Oh! and also, about the winter greens: Use whatever you like. We hodge-podged everything left from our farmer for the week, but any winter greens would do.

Ingredients:

8 cups (about 200g) chopped winter greens, any tough stems removed

3/4 cup sliced roasted peppers (from about 1 large or 2 small peppers)

4 ounces feta cheese, crumbled

for the dressing:

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

1 clove of garlic, roasted, mashed, and chopped

1 to 2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary

plus:

salt to taste (about 3 pinches)

Directions:

In a large bowl, combine chopped lettuce, sliced peppers, and crumbled feta. In a bowl or mason jar, combine dressing ingredients and stir/blend or shake the covered jar to combine. Pour dressing over salad. Toss everything together. Add salt to taste---for me, that was about three five-finger pinches.

Tim and I got a new bathroom ceiling this week. First, we got a massive ceiling bubble that Tim had to pop with a knife, straddling the toilet and the tub, a five-gallon bucket in his other hand while water shot from the ceiling cyst like milk from a cow; but then, beginning Wednesday and ending, hopefully, right around the time this post publishes, a nice handyman named Jim patched and worked and painted things, and our ceiling looked like a ceiling again. I’m not afraid to use the bathroom anymore, and I don’t have to drive down the street to White Castle to sneak into the ladies’ room, so obviously things are looking up. Also, Monday night and Tuesday night, like rewards for the days we’d survived and laughed through, the two of us sat down to matching plates piled high with salads like this one. Even I have to admit it’s hard to complain when your plate is full of this.[Read more…]

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"That's at the root of all giving, don't you think? At the root of all art. You can't hoard the beauty you've drawn into you; you've got to pour it out again for the hungry, however feebly, however stupidly. You've just got to." Elizabeth Goudge

"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world." J.R.R. Tolkien

"Every kind word spoken, every meal proffered in love, every prayer said, can become a feisty act of redemption that communicates a reality opposite to the destruction of a fallen world." Sarah Clarkson